Van Halen 1 Pickup Interesting Information

[Nitro]

https://1978guitarsandspecs.wordpress.com/2023/03/30/van-halen-i/

 

[freefrog]

There's this one too, for the record:

The crazy story of the Legend playing a "180k" ohm humbucker for live and records without anyone noticing it

After The death of this guitar player, Larry Dimarzio wrote a remembering tribute pdf about this guitarist and it passed almost unnoticed in the guitar community. The story is so crazy that you begin to ask yourself if what happens to this guitar player is like not random but litteral fate and...

www.marshallforum.com

 

[Les Paulverizer]

Very interesting article, and it made me think...
I know I'm going against the grain here, but people tend to put so much importance on gear, and the minutests details, I find it all quite....hilarious.
According to the above article, for his monumentally important Frankenstrat Eddie, on the likewise monumentally important "Van Halen 1", used an old PAF from an old 335, which we all kinda already knew, but his Ibanez Explorer, basically used for all the parts where we don't hear a whammy bar, had the standard Ibanez Super 70 pickups, which most folks would've thrown away and replaced with "quality" replacement pickups....and he sounded exactly the same on both guitars!
It's also funny to think how in the 80's a lot of players, in order to get that "Van Halen brown sound" started using extremely high output pickups & stuff, including extremely high gain amps, when Eddie got his groundbreaking tone going exactly the opposite way...
I've had the fortune of working with some known producers, who in between takes and during chill times would spill the beans on what happened during the recording of some of the albums they were involved with, and it all leads to the same conclusion; Tone is in the fingers, talent, and attitude.

 

[Nitro]

I hear you but each Van Halen album sounds different due to changes in gear, Edwards sound/tone is different from his style of playing

 

[Les Paulverizer]

I hear you but each Van Halen album sounds different due to changes in gear, Edwards sound/tone is different from his style of playing

Absolutely, , Eddie himself kept saying “I’m always chasing tone…” and indeed from album to album his tone changed slightly, matter of my favourite Van Halen tone is on “Fair Warning” and “1984”, but I was just referring to their 1st album: different guitars on different tunes, same sound.

 

[ARandall]

Gotta remember that what you hear on record is not the 'sound of the gear' alone. You could play the same rig with the same setting on every song you ever recorded, but change mics and placement plus all the post production stuff and suddenly you could have a vastly different tone on every song that some would be convinced was down to 'gear'.

 

[Nitro]

Edward didn’t sound like he did on the first album when they went out for the 78 tour

 

[ARandall]

Exactly.
Recent thread on the Duncan forum and everyone is saying the Duncan Custom is the sound of the first album. But that I guess is to get an in room tone comparing it to the recorded tone.

 

[freefrog]

Shouldn't articles about EVH pickups talk about piezo?

About tone, this one is not without interest either... ;-)